Status Updates From Central Europa

"A lamp's snow-white incandescence, his own pale, pudgy reflection-silhouette upon the piano lid, his score glowing like a slab of light, the long white jaw: bone of piano keys which sang to him who caressed it, so ran his world which was guarded to a precarious security by the outward spiralings of squat little bombers with red stars"

A fable of Shostakovich's Symphony No 7 written during the siege of Leningrad.